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All Rise...

Judge Daryl Loomis ain't gonna hurt ya...he just wants some company.

The Charge

A new kind of suspense as you follow the psycho into a new dimension of
horror!

Opening Statement

You can't get your hopes too high when watching a Something Weird release,
but receiving a collection called Weird Noir was bound to get me a little
excited. I really shouldn't have let it happen, because I'm probably more
disappointed that I really had any right to be. Of these six movies, a couple
are decent and all of them are mighty sleazy, so let's head into the past with a
look at the lowest tier of crime films one will find.

Facts of the Case

Girl on the Run: Accused of killing his boss, a reporter infiltrates a
small town carnival in hopes of exposing the real killer, who is closer than he
thinks.

The Naked Road: After giving up his girlfriend to a rural sheriff as
collateral for a speeding ticket, a sleazy modeling agent drives to the big city
to get the cash. Unfortunately, the sheriff had other plans, and sold her off to
an even sleazier guy who will turn her into a sex slave.

The Seventh Commandment: A car accident leaves a man with amnesia
and, when he wanders away from the accident, he is taken in by a preacher and
put to work in his church. He shows remarkable healing powers and becomes a
reverend himself, but years later, his old girlfriend shows up and blackmails
him about a death that he caused but doesn't remember.

Fear No More: Sharon Carlin (Mala Powers, Sierra Baron) is
accused of killing a woman on a train, but escapes and returns home only to find
another body. Nothing is what it seems, and though she tries to clear her name,
the world seems out to get her, until she's reminded that she was just released
from a mental hospital.

Fallguy: A young roughneck stops to help an accident victim who turns
out to be a mobster with a gun, and the kid realizes he walked into a murder
plot. Now, he's going to get fingered for the crime if he can't figure out a way
to clear his name.

Stark Fear: Despite all the abuse, when Ellen Winslow (Beverly
Garland, Swamp Women) comes home to find that her husband's taken off,
she heads out to get him back. As she starts digging into his past, she
discovers he's much worse than she ever dreamed.

The Evidence

None of the movies in this collection are all that good, but there's plenty
to have fun to be. Stark Fear, in particular, has an extremely slimy vibe
that plays up the criminal underbelly of a small rural town in a way that higher
rent productions wouldn't have dreamed of trying to push past censors. It's
terribly violent and so mean to its characters that it comes across like a James
Thompson story, cheap and wildly sleazy.

It's my favorite on the set, but Fear No More is the one that most
closely resembles a real movie. It's a solidly paranoid whodunit with
surprisingly believable performances and a good structure that makes you
question what you've seen onscreen before delivering the goods in a satisfying
reveal. On the crazy end, it doesn't get much weirder than The Naked
Road, which doesn't seem like it'll go the sex slave route until it actually
does. The only problem is that it shoots itself in the foot with a bit about how
she deserves mercy because she's a nice, religious girl. Isn't that the whole
point, or have I been misunderstanding these movies this whole time?

It goes downhill pretty quickly after that. Girl on the Run and
The Seventh Commandment are both bad, but short and fun. Fallguy,
though, is about as bad as movies can get. They can't even spell the title
right, and it resembles a home movie more than it does something that could
actually air on a movie screen. Still, it's probably the best example one can
find of ramshackle roadshow films, so I guess there's some historical value in
it, at the very least.

Image Entertainment, under the Something Weird label, has released Weird
Noir in a bare bones edition, without even their customary trailer bank of
ridiculous movies. The entries look pretty mixed, but all the transfers fare
pretty well. There is some damage on all the prints, and though some are worse
than others, the only one that looks really bad is Fallguy. The sound is
pretty mixed, as well, with some hard to hear from the background noise and some
almost perfectly clear.

Closing Statement

There are plenty of really good film noir sets out there, some of which
actually feature decent movies. Weird Noir is not one of those sets, but
it's a good set for genre fans looking for some low rent entertainment and
terrible acting. Regardless of their relative quality, they're all pretty fun,
and that's enough.